LBC Sermons & Messages

John 1:15-34

Continuing our tour through the gospel of John, we come to the person of John the Baptist. He is significant for being the last Old Testament prophet.

For over 400 years there had been silence from God. No prophet had brought God’s word to His people. The Jews were waiting for a prophet to come. Scriptures told them that Elijah would return. Moses spoke of a coming prophet. Many Old Testament verses promised a Messiah, the Christ.

We know the Jews were eagerly waiting for a sign of Elijah’s return, the prophet, and the Christ, from verses 15-22. The priests and Levites sent people to ask John if he was the Christ. John said no. Was he Elijah? John said no. Was he the prophet? John said no.

“Then who are you?” they asked. John was baptisting, and preaching repentance with authority. John quoted Isaiah. “I am one crying in the wilderness. Make straight the way the of the Lord.” John’s mission was to point out, to the Jews, who the Messiah was.

In reality, John had already done this over a month before. When he baptized Jesus, he saw the Holy Spirit descend upon Jesus in form of a dove – perhaps the only time the Holy Spirit has taken a physical form. Jesus had immediately afterward gone into the wilderness for his 40 days of testing. This testing would prove that the “second Adam” was worthy of the role of redeemer.

When the Jews came to John, Jesus may well have just returned from the wilderness and stood among the crowd of people with them. (see verse 26) John’s message was that Jesus is that Savior they were waiting for.

Those who reject Him, after He has been so clearly pointed out, have willingly accepted their fate. Those who heed John’s message – that Jesus IS the Lamb of God who alone can save us – will have eternal life.

I Kings 17:8-24

Last week we looked at how God led Elijah to the widow of Zaraphath, who was worse off than himself. The drought that affected Israel – which Elijah warned king Ahab about – was affecting the surrounding lands as well. This widow was down to her last meager meal. She had resigned herself to her fate. She and her young son would eat the last scrap, then sit and wait to die. She had no hope.

There is a note of bitterness in her greeting to Elijah in verse 12. “As YOUR Lord thy God liveth, I have not a cake…” She knew of the Jews and of their God, Jehovah. The Zidonian’s own god, Baal, had obviously failed to bring rain, but in the widow’s eyes, the Jews’ God was just as powerless. Hence her taunt of a greeting.

How much is that widow like our modern world. We suffer, people around us suffer, and we expect God to fix it all for us. Make it nice. When He doesn’t, people assume He’s powerless and scoff at His name.

God saved the widow and her son’s lives with the miracle of the never-failing flour and oil, yet she still did not believe Jehovah was truly the Lord of all. She probably felt like having a prophet in her house insulated her from harm. When her son died, it shocked her out of her comfortable indifference. She admitted her sins.

When Elijah pled with God to restore the boy and the boy returned to life, the widow was convinced that what Elijah had been telling her about God was true. “The word of the Lord is truth.”

Do we become lukewarm because, like the widow, we benefit from second-hand blessings? We can live with a believer who is being blessed for their faithfulness, yet this does not save us. We need to acknowledge God for who He is. Lord of all. Then we can lay claim to the blessings of being one of His children – directly!

John 1:4-13

Last week we saw that the timeless Word was God, who entered into human history as the Son of God, the God-man Jesus and revealed himself to all mankind thru grace and truth. This affirmation demands a response.

In verses 3 thru 5, we get a hint of a struggle going on over this affirmation. Darkness is used as a personification of the response of evil trying to overcome the light shinning thru the darkness. John 3:19-20 reveals the intensity of this battle, as evil doers choose darkness over light because they love their evil deeds and do not want their sins to be exposed. An interesting phrase is recorded in John 13:30, when Judas betrayed Jesus this verse states that “it was night” when he did this.

The world is in spiritual darkness and it is into this darkness that the Light (Jesus) came, to show the way to escape out of it. As an illustration, if you were in a dark cave and suddenly there in the distance you saw a point of light, we would begin to head for that light. Jesus came, to bring us out of darkness into his light.

How we experience this deliverance is mentioned in verses 12 and 13. In these verses, believing and receiving are equated together. It is not enough just to intellectually acknowledge the truth concerning Jesus, but we must actually receive Him into our lives. John 6:52-59 gives us a good explanation of what it means to receive Jesus. It’s like eating, we need to eat food to live physically, so it is spiritually, we must take in Christ into our lives. This is accomplished by realizing that we don’t want to continue the life style we are in and desire a new way, this is repentance and we in faith then turn to Jesus and ask Him to save us.

This deliverance is all of God.

Jesus is God; each one of us is responsible for the decision we make concerning Him. To those who accept Him, eternal life and light. To those who reject Him, eternal darkness and spiritual death in Lake of Fire.

I Kings 17:8-16

Sin does not just affect the individual who is sinning, but also those around them. Because of King Ahab and a large segment of Israel turning to Baal as their god, Jehovah disciplines the nation with a drought. That drought is affecting nations around Israel, bringing everyone to a dire existence.

Elijah himself is affected, with his water supply drying up, but he faithfully waits until God tells him to move on. Directions come, God does ignore the plight of His own, and He relates to Elijah that it now time “to arise”, “to go”, and “to stay with a widow in the town of Zarephath”.

Why does God send Elijah to this town? This is the center of Baal worship and it is King Ahab territory, his own back yard so to speak. But there is a woman there that God wants Elijah to minister to. Clearly we see the sovereignty of God at work here.

The widow is in a worse condition than Elijah, but we must never measure God goodness or provisions by what we see with our physical eyes. Remember Isaiah 55:8 which states –“my ways are not your ways, your thoughts are not my thoughts”.

Elijah makes a request of her and she responds by agreeing to it. I don’t believe she was a believer at this point but she needed to see the testimony of Elijah and the power of God working on her behalf.

Circumstances give us opportunity to witness to other about the grace of God. Do things look impossible to you? Does it look like there is not answer? Remember God has brought you to this point. He will care for you, and very likely there is someone there that He wants you to minister to.

John 1:1-18

John states in Chapter 20:31, the purpose for the writing of the Gospel of John is “that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ … and that by believing we may have life …”. In the first eighteen verses, John makes a declaration as to whom Jesus is and he uses the term “Word”, as a personification of Jesus as the divine self-revelation of God. This “Word” is the creator who at a certain point in human history entered into the human race as a man and revealed God’s glory thru grace and truth. The rest of the gospel of John is written to prove this statement.

Verse 1, John is challenging those who would deny the existence of God. The word translated as “was”, implies no beginning, no ending, timeless, therefore before Genesis 1, there was the “Word”. He is not identified as the Father but was God, indicating the truth of the Trinity.

Verse 14, John is challenging those who would deny the deity of Jesus. This timeless being, at a point in human history became man, lived among us and was seen as the only begotten Son of God full of grace and truth. Out of eternity the Word, became a man (Jesus), sinless due to His virgin birth, but yet he experienced all the physical limitation that we all struggle with. He was one of a kind, unique, the God-man, full of glory which is the sum total of all that He is.

Verse 18, John states that this unique individual, revealed God to mankind thru grace and truth. No one had ever seen God before, why? – Because God is a Spirit, but now has revealed Himself to us, so that we may know who God is.

John has made his declaration. The question before us now is “what are we going to do with this revelation” Ultimately every person who has ever lived, will have to stand before this “Word” and answer this question.

Next week we will see what the proper response must be, in order to have eternal life.

I Kings 17:5-7

According to II Cor 4:16-18, God allows pressures and problems in our lives to build up the inner man, so that our faith and trust in Him will grow to the point where “we do not lose heart”. Elijah as well as each of us, need to build up our confidence to this same point.

Confidence towards the Word of God (v5), “so he went and did …”. In John 14:15, we are told, “if you love me, keep my commandments”. Real obedience of our Christianity isn’t seen in our work or theological purity, but is found in this: when we have an opportunity to wander away, do we choose instead to stay close to Him. Psalm 37:5 tells us to “commit to the Lord. This will involve our emotions (v4), our careers (v5) and our reputation (v6). Elijah chose to obey immediately.

We need to develop confidence in the Sovereignty of God (v6). We have been programmed to depend upon something other than God, that we are sufficient to figure out a way to achieve worth in life without bowing before God. The Biblical view is to trust in Matt 6:26, if God will care for a sparrow, he will certainly take care of us. Psalm 103:19, states “God’s kingdom rules over all”, and Psalm 115:3 states “God does all that He pleases”. Therefore, we need to recognize that we need to call upon Him and know that any other way cannot help us.

Finally we need to be confident in God even when circumstances don’t appear right. After a period of time the water from the brook Cherith began to dry up. We have a tendency to measure God’s graciousness by the provision He supplies. We begin to panic and we develop the motto “do something”. Elijah by this point had learned to trust and wait upon the Lord for further instruction. This is something that we need to learn in our own personal lives, “Wait on the Lord”.

Confidence in the Lord will be a life long process, but it will happen.

Isaiah 53:10-12

These are the last three verses dealing with the suffering Servant, and in effect bring us back around to Chapter 52:13 which stated that this Servant would be exalted. While Isaiah, never identified who this servant was, from NT writings we know that it is the Lord Jesus Christ.

Underlining this suffering was the willingness of the Servant to accomplish this. Just as Judah was willing to bear the punishment for his younger brother (Gen 44), so too was Jesus willing to suffer and die in our place for our sin. We note in these verses that the suffering of the Servant was able to produce the desired result, due to the fact this was done according to the father’s will (v10).

We might ask ourselves; does God allow bad things to happen to the innocent? The answer is yes, to bring about a greater good. The next two verses inform us what was the greater good of Jesus suffering.

(1) Our justification (v11). This involved a final and perfect offering for sin. John 1:29 says of Jesus “behold the lamb of God … which takes away the sin of the world”. This resulted in “many offspring”, a term referring to the believers in Christ as their Savior. Not “all” but “many” offspring. In the ancient Jewish economy, offspring were a symbol of God’s blessing, so to with us in the spiritual realm.

(2) His exaltation (v12). In Phil 2:9-11 we are told of Jesus that “God has highly exalted Him …” and in our verse Jesus will divide His prosperity with His “many” offspring. This verse concludes with four reasons for his exaltation: His willingness to die for us, His willingness to be identified with us, His willingness to suffer our judgment, and His willingness to intercede on our behalf.

As we come to the Lord’s Table let us never forget what it was the Jesus did and accomplished for us by His suffering and shedding of His blood that we (the many) might be saved.

I Kings 17:4

Valleys (maturing experiences) always precede mountain top victories. Each maturing experience is dependent on the one before it (Rom 5:3-4). The psalmist writes in Psalm 119:67, 71, that before he was tried he went astray, b ut during the trials he got back into the Word of God and the result was he now lives by the truth of God’s Word. So it will be with us.

In Elijah’s case and ours also. We need to learn to trust in the provider. With each test, our faith, our devotion and our confidence to God will be refined and strengthened, and God’s sovereignity will be exhibited. To some God will test with an abundance, Like with Solomon, to others He will test with just enough, like with Elijah.

What ever maturing experiences God brings into our lives, God has promised to meet our needs thru it (Phil 4:19) and it will be our responsibility to respond properly.

In Elijah case, “he was to drink from the brook”, and to this he was to be content. We as God’s children thru our faith in Christ, need to be content with however God choses to meet our needs. With no predetermined conditions on our part.

Secondly, we need to accept God’s provision. With Elijah, God would feed him thru ravens, an unclean animal according to the Law of Moses. God’s resources are limitless and He is sovereign to use normal resources or supernatural resources. We need to learn to accept which ever way God determines to use in our life.

We need to follow the advise of Solomon in Eccl 7:11-14. Recognize our need for godly wisdom, for it will guide, protect and preserves us (v11-12). But also consider the work of God, for He can put bends in the road which we cannot change (v13). Verse 14 is our response, “in the day of prosperity, rejoice, and in days of adversity, consider. God has made both.

So we need to learn to trust in the provider, God Himself and not the provision.